Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new post to his blog today about making your Zend Server instance a bit more secure by taking the admin GUI and forcing it to be HTTPS-only (instead of the default HTTP & HTTPS).

In light of the recent remote PHP exploit, I decided to update a couple servers I manage to ensure they weren't vulnerable. In each case, I had been using hand-compiled PHP builds, but decided that I'm simply too busy lately to be trying to maintain updates -- so I decided to install Zend Server. [...] One thing I've never been happy about, however, is that by default Zend Server exposes its administration GUI via both HTTP and HTTPS. Considering that the password gives you access to a lot of sensitive configuration, I want it to be encrypted.

He points out that, since the Zend Server interface runs on a lighttpd instance, it's easy to modify a few config files to change the setting. Adding a few lines to limit the socket it can connect on, the IP address to filter to and a URL filter on anything starting with "/ZendServer/" takes away the HTTP access.